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Ever wonder why you may look prettier in some photos and uglier in others, even with the same smile and the same lighting? It’s all about the camera lens. These portraits — taken by Stephen Eastwood – show how this works.
If you have ever used a dating site and thought “damn, he/she looked so hot in those pictures! What happened?” or “wow! He/she looks a lot better in person,” you know exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s all about the lens distortion (which is also affected by the subject’s distance to the camera). Lenses make the world look different than it does through your eyes. They bend light rays, capturing the scene within a certain field of view into a limited bi-dimensional frame: the photograph. Depending on the lens’ focal length, the image will deform more or less, affecting how faces and objects look in photos.
The shorter the focal length, the more field of you view you can capture. With something like a 15mm fish eye lens, the effect is really obvious. Your face would be extremely deformed, like the rest of the environment. But as you go up, the distortion gets more subtle. Sometimes this distortion can make a face prettier than it actually is. Sometimes the effect makes a face uglier. Since this subtler distortion is not obvious, your mind just buys the image thinking that this is what the person looks like.
The same happens with larger focal lengths. At 350mm there’s also a distortion: your face become flatter and wider.
In theory, shooting with something like a 135mm would produce the best, most accurate results, but there’s no right or wrong here. It depends on your subject’s anatomy. That’s why some people are “photogenic” with certain cameras and at certain angles, and look horrible with others.
If you pay attention, you can really observe this effect in everyday photos taken with mobile phones and compact cameras. You can even see it without even changing the lens focal length. While taking photos with my iPhone on a recent trip, placing some people on the center of the frame made them look better, especially from a distance. Then, as I moved them to the sides of the frame, they looked sightly different. The distortion is more obvious near the sides, and it was enough to make them less attractive. The funny thing is that the contrary happened with me: I looked better on the sides than on the centre. Or maybe it was just that I had a horrible hangover the whole trip. [Stephen Eastwood via Petapixel]
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How Nikon Makes the Glass Inside Its Lenses
What Drinking, Smoking and Eating Too Much Will Do to Your Face (It Ain't Pretty)
I don’t think a lens has been invented that’ll make me look good in a photo.
I is sad.
The Beer Lens. Trust me, it works. I’ve woken up next to some absolute swamp donkeys after a night at Temple Walkabout.
I is sad
Best stay off the sauce if we ever have the promised commenter meet-up then, otherwise things could get awkward here afterwards.
That would be a kodak moment for sure.
On a more serious note, this is a nice Diaz article for a change. Reminds me of the stuff he used to write from Spain.
Kat, are we gonna have UK specific shooting challenge stuff? Would be cool.
It was a pretty great post, wasn’t it?
There aren’t any plans for a UK-specific shooting challenge yet, but that’s more down to the fact our team is only two members (plus freelancers) so it’s a little tricky to organise. But bear with us!
Are the focal lengths in this article for full frame cameras or doesnt this make a difference with cropped sensors?
If I remember correctly the guy that made those example photos was using a 5D. For a crop camera you can shift the focal lengths to the image to the right for a rough approximation, so the first normal looking one would be taken with a 35mm instead of 50mm.